“Since the stakes are much higher, it’s not something you can wing,” Navneeth said. But some in the spelling community say they make the competition more dependent on luck and less about rewarding spellers for their years spent mastering roots and language patterns and exploring the farthest reaches of Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary. That’s an important consideration after the eight-way tie of 2019. The tweaks help ensure the bee, which began Tuesday with the preliminary rounds and concludes Thursday, finishes on schedule with a sole champion. Last year’s national runner-up, Vikram Raju, didn’t make it back in his final year of eligibility. And because there is no alternative path to the bee as there was in the late 2010s, the regional bees spellers must win to qualify can be incredibly tense, and sometimes shocking. Accomplished spellers can be bounced from the bee without ever misspelling a word. The vocabulary questions are part of a series of changes to the post-pandemic bee, which is leaner and, in some ways, meaner. – AUDIO QUIZ: Try to spell the words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.Package content is not flexible and cannot be modified. Please note that if your order ships in multiple boxes, package components may not all be in the same box. The package item number is also listed at the bottom of your packing slip for reference. On your packing slip, package components are picked and packed individually and are identified with the code 'PKGCMP' in the price column. Any backordered components will ship separately as they become available.

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